Tag: D.A. Carson

Not only do the Scriptures shape the Christian’s mind into a worldview profoundly alien to the secularist and the endlessly selfish person, and not only do the Scriptures make us “wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus”, but precisely because they are “God­breathed,” the Scriptures are “useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness”. The danger in contemporary evangelicalism is not formal rejection of Scripture, but an unrealistic assumption that we know the Bible while in fact we press “on” (in reality, slouch backwards) toward endless conferences on leadership, techniques, tools, gimmicks, agendas. Some of these might even be useful if the Bible itself were not so commonly sidelined.

When God finds us so puffed up that we do not feel our need for him, it is an act of kindness on his part to take us down a peg or two; it would be an act of judgment to leave us in our vaulting self-esteem.

In our pragmatic, materialistic society, where each of us seeks comfort and “fulfillment” and respect, it is hard to follow a despised, crucified Messiah— unless we fix our eyes on the end. If we do not aim for the new heaven and the new earth, many of our values and decisions in this world will be myopic, unworthy, tarnished, fundamentally wrongheaded. To put the matter bluntly: Can biblical spirituality long survive where Christians are not oriented to the world to come?